My guest today is Joshua Philippe is the Head of Design at Strike a service that leverages Bitcoin’s open payment network to offer users the first global peer-to-peer payments app and a novel bitcoin-native neobanking experience. Interview Video: https://youtu.be/Xxd5NJ37-Lk In this episode, we discuss the following: - Joshua Philippe Bio - How childhood affects your listening skills? - Should designers coming out of school join FAANG or a design agency? - Should you join a late stage company or early stage startup as a designer? - What is a T-shaped designer? - Why designers need to have a mission statement? - Favorite comics, collecting baseball and Yu Gi Oh cards - Benefits of working as a designer at a branding agency - When & Why should a designer consider leaving the agency world? - Doing freelance gigs on top of 9-5 job - Should designers choose equity or money when consulting with startups? - Joining Strike - How to get promoted to Head of Design role at a startup? - How to get in touch with Joshua Philippe? For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show
Joshua Philippe is the Head of Design at Strike, a service that leverages Bitcoin’s open payment network to offer users the first global peer-to-peer payments app and a novel bitcoin-native neobanking experience. He has spent a decade working with clients like Apple, Dolby, Chevrolet, Intel, Lincoln Jaguar Land Rover, Stanford Health, Steinway & Sons, Tiffany & Co., and Verizon to develop experiences that span both the digital and physical.
INTERVIEW VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/Xxd5NJ37-Lk
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Namaste and welcome. I am Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to the design MBA which is a real-life MBA program for designers. You will learn how to launch a side hustle and level up your design careers from the interviews rock star designers.
Jayneil Dalal: Today's amazing guest, for all of you who are watching or listening to this episode, is Joshua Phillip. Who is Joshua? Joshua, can you believe, has a decade of experience as a designer, delivering value in the intersection of brand, experience in product. Think about the clients he's worked with. Apple, Dolby, Chevrolet, Intel, Lincoln, Jaguar, Land Rover, Stanford Health, Tiffany, Verizon, the list goes on and on. He's currently the head of design at Strike a service that leverages Bitcoin's open payment network to offer users the first global peer-to-peer payments app and a novel bitcoin native new banking experience. And he's currently the head of design there creating phenomenal experiences.
So, without further ado, Joshua, welcome to the show, my friend.
Joshua Philippe: Hey, Jayneil, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
Jayneil Dalal: I'm kind of curious about this. In the conversations that I had with you in the prep call and stuff, you're someone that is a very good listener. You say what people say in 100 words but you say with a few words. Everything is thought through. I'm kind of curious how did you become that person? Were you always that or in time you just became this person that listens a lot?
Joshua: I think that that's probably two-fold. One aspect was growing up in a military family, I ended up moving pretty much every two to three years to a new state, a new country. And each time I'd have to kind of restart and reset. And I think I kind of picked up a lot earlier or very early on the fact that people want to be listened to and heard and that's a good way to actually make friends. And so, from there, I think, that was a general disposition but in terms of the workplace environment, I was fortunate enough to have a couple of mentors throughout my career and getting a chance to see them not only be involved with creating the work but then also in selling and pitching the work and how much time they spent crafting a presentation, if you will. And the thought and the care that they put into every word really started to resonate, I think. In the beginning of my career in the agency side of things was just one thing that I took for granted but moving in-house, I see that that's actually quite … one of those strong differentiators in terms of the soft skill and … yeah, so, I think that upbringing in terms of moving around and then also having the fortunate ability to kind of witness some of these mentors and see them in action.
Jayneil: What countries did you go to outside? I'm kind of curious now.
Joshua: Yeah. So, I was in this weird situation to where I was born in North Carolina and my dad was in aviation in army. And so, most of the aviation headquarter is out of North Carolina, Fort Bragg. And so, I was born there. I moved to Italy, moved back to North Carolina, moved to New Jersey, moved back to North Carolina, moved to Texas, moved back to North Carolina, and then moved to South Korea and then ultimately ended up going back to school in North Carolina. So, I had this weird kind of experience where we lived off base in North Carolina and it would be a time capsule. So, each time I moved somewhere else, I'd go and see and meet new people and visit new places and I'd come back. And this was a pretty rural county in North Carolina where a lot of people never really left the state. And so, it was this … yeah, it was a very strange, strange but cool experience at the same time growing up.
Jayneil: You know, as designers, we’re told that we have to be empathetic. We have to be empathetic towards the user's needs but when I hear about your story about growing up in different parts of the world, different cultures, it's almost like you've got a crash course in empathy, right? Like empathy for different cultures, listening and those things you mentioned.
Joshua: Yeah, yeah, it's a good … it's a good way to really put in perspective how small we are in the world. And there's no one right way of being, if you will.
Jayneil: Wow! You know, a dilemma that happens to a lot of designers who are graduating out of design school is “Should I join a big company like a large company or should I join a Feng or should I join an agency world?” And I know a lot of people, the advice out there, maybe I'm biased, but what I've seen more often is “Hey, join the glorious big companies.” What is your take on that?
Joshua: Yeah. I think it all depends on where you're coming at it from in life. And there are definite pros and cons to each route. My hand was slightly forced in the fact that I didn't have the background or kind of the portfolio early on in my career to knock on the doorways to get into those big companies. And so, I think somewhere around 200 something odd résumés later after I graduated that I got my first break in the door. And then it was from there I kind of landed on the agency side of things. and I can tell you just from my own personal experience the benefits of doing the agency side of life before necessarily transitioning into an in-house role. And that was primarily around the fact that you just got such a breadth of experiences across different Industries. So, within the branding world, I was working with Stanford, I was working with these wine growers down in Mendoza, Argentina. We did some work with JC Penney's and it was … each project, it was basically a mini crash course in what their business model was and exactly kind of what made each thing tick. And the experience design side of things, I got to expand that and work with a bunch of different disciplines within one agency model. And so, within that, there's a range of coverage, if you will, or vector size that just multiplies by, I don't know what the appropriate number would be to actually call out there, which you don't get whenever you go into one of these larger agencies. And oftentimes, the processes are so baked in and the orgs themselves are pretty well tuned at a point when you're joining a company like Meta where if it's your first job in the door or in your career, you're oftentimes going to not be exposed to kind of the overall impact and the strategy as to why you're building a certain button or component in a certain way. And your interactions within that company are limited to maybe your direct manager and then your group of peers but you're never necessarily interfacing in beyond the engineering counterparts that you'll have in these modern product companies with too many sides of the rest of the business. And so …
Jayneil: So, let's pick on that a little bit. You said like … and I really love that point … what you said is if you're joining, let's say, a big company, you may not necessarily get the opportunity to impact or talk about the strategy of the product versus if you join the agency side of things, you might be able to influence that or talk about this. Can you give a more detailed example of that, what that means?
Joshua: Yeah. So, I think a better example here to pull parallels from like more of an apples-to-apples comparison would be joining a late-stage company versus joining an early stage startup. So, in terms of your impact and your ability to be seen and heard throughout the organization, if you join in a company and you're one of the third, fourth, fifth designers and it's underneath the 75-person head count, you're going to be exposed not only to progressing in your craft but also progressing in the ways that you interface with different stakeholders from different orgs and starting to understand the reason being for all these requests coming through. And I think that gets back to empathy ultimately where if you're able to understand what is it that law is … your legal team is going to be wanting to review whenever I send them these Figma files, perhaps you then take an extra 15 minutes to create certain artboards which zoom in on the specific artifacts that they'll need knowing that you're working in this tool that they're not necessarily super familiar with and trying to meet them midway. And so, yeah … I think I might have slightly gotten off cue there but it's just ultimately the range of coverage and the impact you'll be able to have at a smaller stage company, I think, is unbridled in the sense that you're unlocked and your role is not necessarily the thing that you do.
Jayneil: Yeah. And the same thing goes for the agency life, meaning an agency life as well, it's a smaller company. It doesn't have hundreds and hundreds of employees necessarily. So, as a designer, you tend to cover a wider range of functions rather than in a bigger company where you're just doing the specific thing that you've been tasked with.
Joshua: Exactly, yeah.
Jayneil: Wow! I'm pretty sure that when you went to the agency, you picked up the concept of being a T-shaped designer. So, I want to know from you what does it mean to be a T-shaped designer. What does that concept mean?
Joshua: Yeah. So, the T-shaped designer origin started with Tim Brown out of IDL. And that's an experience design studio that was, I think, founded in San Francisco. And that's all about a certain mentality that you'll bring to kind of how you approach your career and it was that if you focus and you actually are able to go deep in one discipline … so, for my chosen discipline, I was visual design … and really push and excel in every way that you can there and then also focus on understanding at least the core tenets of the rest of the stakeholders or kind of groups that you're involved with, your ability to impact an organization and to actually move for change is going to be much greater than someone who's just a specialist in one general area. And also, that increases your ability to provide impact at these smaller organizations because you're comfortable with jumping out of the one thing that you've necessarily been known as. And it's not necessary that you're fantastic to get that thing but that you can contribute, that you can push it forward and that you're willing to jump in.
Jayneil: Wow! So, it's almost like, if I had to just use a simple way to describe it, maybe something jack of all trades but master of some like there's some disciplines where you really go in depth but then you're able to also speak at some level about the other ones as well.
Joshua: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's a lot of conversations out there, is it a T-shaped designer, is it an X-shaped designer. I think that that kind of misses the point. Really, I think that it's the importance of generalist approach to your career. And I think that it can't be overstated how important that can be to some designers early on if they don't necessarily know what they want to do or why they're doing what they're doing and see … craft can only push you along in terms of passion before you need to have a mission behind what you're really trying to pursue in life. And I think that …
Jayneil: Why do you say that?
Joshua: Well, again, I guess that is probably a pretty personal statement but I reached a point in my career where I had designed a financial desktop dashboard experience for the fourth time and each time it got better and each time I was able to iterate and I felt I was performing at a pretty high level but that as an exercise into itself seems slightly futile. And you can take a stoic approach to life and you could say “I'm going to make this button the best button.” For some people that's going to be absolutely fine and that's an incredible path to take if that's what brings you joy but I think, for me, I was … as my career has progressed and as I've grown as a human, I'm definitely not the same person I was when I was 21 straight out of college, remaining a generalist and having the ability to see so many different industries and to let my own personal interest evolve and then once those all came to a head and I started to say like “This is what really moves me in my personal life. How can I take my craft and then merge those two things so that it's not just pursuit of technical excellence? It's also a pursuit of technical excellence and support of some larger cause.”
Jayneil: So, then my question to you comes regarding being the generalist designer like you still have to pick some disciplines and kind of create that mastery but then you're still generalist. So, you said your depth in that being a generalist designer was visual design. Now, mine isn’t visual design. Mine is more of design strategy, facilitation, a lot of those things. so, is that okay or do I need to make sure that “Hey, my depth is also you, visual design” because I know I mean visuals matter.
Joshua: But I think that if you're a comic book fan and you're looking at the Justice League and you're looking at the makeup of those superhero characteristics, they all play a very specific role in supporting each other and they all have weaknesses that are, I guess, supported by the other teammates’ strengths. And so, it's in the same way that whenever you're building out a design team, you're not going to want everyone to play the same instrument. That just doesn't … that's not how fantastic things are made. And so, in terms of whenever you're crafting out a team and when you're building and looking for these new hires, that would be an incredible thing if you were able to like talk about that in an interview kind of that process and expose how capable you are in that but then being able to jump in and contribute to the rest of the team's organizations, even if it's not necessarily strong suit … I think ideas … great ideas come from everyone in the agency regardless of whether or not you're technically capable of drawing a straight line. So, I wouldn't say that that one thing is the right thing. I think it's as long as you're able to continue to progress in that one thing … you know, visual design is a very deep discipline. At the base you have typography and these core tenements of what proper layouts are. and from there you can go into graphic design and from there you can go into product design and motion and prototyping. And so, it was a really … visual design, I think, is one of the uniquely positioned fields to really get you into a wide variety of different industries and also agency and in-house experiences whereas some of perhaps more specialized disciplines may not give you the full range of options later on in your career.
Jayneil: Fair. You know what I'm curious about? What is your favorite comics?
Joshua: My favorite comics.
Jayneil: Yeah. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.
Joshua: I used to collect comics and …
Jayneil: Okay.
Joshua: When I was … comics and baseball cards when I was growing up. I don't think I've picked up one since … for a while but a Nightwing was my favorite back when I was in eighth grade. I think it was a spin-off of the Batman Universe. And so, that was … yeah, that was my guy.
Jayneil: Wow!
Joshua: What about yourself?
Jayneil: For me, it's Tintin. I grew up in India. Tintin was very popular there. Tintin and then cozy second would be Calvin and Hobbs. I loved both of them a lot, just the playfulness. And then you mentioned collecting baseball cards. I was big into collecting Yu-Gi-Oh cards. And a funny story is … and I left it, you know … you do this when you're in high school. And so, you forget about it. And then during COVID, I went with my brother to Walmart and I'm like “I saw this whole shelf of Yu-Gi-Oh cards and I was like … I bought the whole shelves. So, I bought like … I don't know, like 300 worth of cards. Literally the whole aisle, we just bought it, me and my brother. And we kind of like went home and it was just yeah kind of making up for all the lost time. And we pulled one card that looked so weird visually and then we later found out that this is an ultra, ultra-rare card and they ended up selling that for 500 bucks, recouping all that … so, it's like … and then recouped all the cost of buying those cards. So, I highly do recommend if you get a chance to buy or get that Nightwing comic again.
Joshua: How do you go looking for them?
Jayneil: Yeah.
Joshua: I felt like COVID brought out a lot of those old habits and things that we used to do and had lost time for.
Jayneil: Absolutely. I'm kind of curious, designers are not necessarily born sales people or sales training is not something that's usually a part of this curriculum like pitching an idea, why the concept should be worked upon. So, I want to know how did you pick up that skill of just pitching to clients and stuff?
Joshua: Absolutely. So, I had a big, I guess, wake-up call when I got out of school and moved into the branding world where I kind of thought the job was done whenever the pixels were aligned and the document was handed over but then I was … it was a small branding agency in San Francisco that I joined and I was the only designer there at the time. And so, I was partnered with the president of the firm and he was this old-school Landor executive from the early ‘90s who had done an incredible kind of portfolio projects during his heyday with FedEx and all these big companies. And so, seeing him and being exposed to kind of how much time and care he put into each slide, how much he tied every decision back to larger business strategy that had been agreed upon in earlier presentations and then also just seeing the way that he structured presentations in terms of what is it that you quickly recoup in terms of the highlights from the last meeting so that a couple of weeks may have gone by, how do you get everyone on board. It's not you're in an in-house environment where everyone is tracking these things on a day-to-day basis. And so, there's a period of kind of storytelling that needs to take place in order to get everyone excited about the decisions that were previously made and about the work that they're going to see. So, I think that that was the first exposure to it and then it just multiplied to the nth degree whenever you got over to the agency side of things or the experience design studio, I was at with Eight. And with the president, would you be up late because … I mean, you're directly working with the president. I mean, would you be sometimes spending some late nights trying to work on stuff and presentations?
Joshua: Yeah. No, I think how healthy or unhealthy that type of culture is, is up for debate but yeah, there was a lot of 1 a.m. nights where it was all hands on deck and just it was … it took … you did what it took to get the presentation out the door. Now, I think that that is absolutely not the way that I continue to work in my day-to-day life but having that experience early on, I think, was really, really impactful in terms of showing me just the importance of what hours in the work mean. And there's no substitute that you can take for four hours of sitting with something and really trying to untangle it and there's no shortcuts to get to that point. Now, there are better ways to structure your time so that you don't have to run till 1 a.m. but it's all the same in the end.
Jayneil: What then made you leave the agency world because seems you had an amazing growth period in there?
Joshua: Yeah. So, I think, there comes a time when you're reaching your 30s and you're starting to take aspect of everything that's occurred in your life and what goals you've hit financially and where you want to be. And while the design side or the design agency side of life is very, I would say, attractive at face value in terms of you have all these Blue Chip clients and you're doing a lot of blue sky thinking, there was kind of this two-fold notion where I was trying to really think about what money was and what money meant to me in terms of why I was working. I was also four years into this agency … I guess I was six years total on the agency side at that point … really had come to a lot of questions that I didn't feel necessarily too great about in terms of what the future trajectory of the agency or design agency model was in particular.
Jayneil: In terms of career growth title wise or you mean like financially monetary wise?
Joshua: Everything, to be honest with you. This was back in 2016 when there was a big slew of experienced design agencies that were actually bought and brought in-house. I think Capital One was kind of the first big group that brought in that service design agency and then everyone else started to follow suit.
Jayneil: I remember that.
Joshua: All these places that I started I thought I wanted to work at … I believe, even Frog was bought … I may I may be misspoken there but these places that I thought “This is going to be the thing that I do in my career. We're starting to move in-house.” And as well after you've spent so much time pitching work on the agency side of things, there's often a deadline or kind of this cut=off period where you hand over your concepts to an internal team or to agency partners and vendors who can actually build those products. And I was kind of at this point in my career where I'd done first portion in branding, I’d done the second portion in experience design and I was “All right. Well, I'd to go and actually build digital products and see how those last two inches are actually filled in” and I'd to do that in an industry in kind of an area that was interesting to me at the time. And I'd started trading Etherium in 2016 and I'd fallen down the rabbit hole in terms of what money meant. And so, crypto was starting to get really interesting in that time period for me because I was using the platforms actively. And there was a big low-hanging fruit opportunity I determined in terms of UX within the exchange world. And so, I started to apply selectively to a couple of different crypto exchanges at that time and it ended up with BitMax.
Jayneil: Oh my God! What's really inspiring to me is that even when you're working in-house as a full-time designer at BitMax, you're still freelancing on the side with a bunch of VC groups if I'm not mistaken, right? Consulting with them on design side?
Joshua: Yeah, I was up until taking on this latest role. I've kind of shut down all side activity just because I want to put my focus on one thing but yeah, for the past couple years, I’ve actually had relationships that have been treating me work outside of my 9-to-5, which have kind of kept things fresh and fun.
Jayneil: So, the motivation there to continue to freelance on the side was just to, I would say, improve your skills or keep them sharp?
Joshua: I think that within an in-house team, after a certain amount of time, you're able to automate a lot of your processes and there are periods of … and so, I got to a point …
Jayneil: (Inaudible) don't listen to it but yeah, you're right.
Joshua: It's all right. So, I'd actually … I was doing a lot of product work at BitMax and I was also doing a lot of brand work but it's within one certain aesthetic style. You don't necessarily get to stretch your imagination too much. And so, just over the course of my career, I've developed relationships with a few different VC firms in the San Francisco Bay area and have been their kind of go-to person whenever they have different portfolio clients that come on board and they're either looking for a UX audit or a visual identity refresh. And so, that was a way for me to make a little extra side money to retain a bit of autonomy in terms of creative direction and just make things that felt good to make. Oftentimes, people are a lot looser with the work for these early stage companies and it was just setting up a basic system rather than necessarily needing to worry too much about AAA accessibility ratings and the … of how a product is actually made.
Jayneil: And out of curiosity, if you don't mind me asking, given that you're dealing with the extreme uncertain area of startups, especially when you're consulting with these VC portfolio companies, did you have a preference that you wanted to get paid in just cash or you're like “Oh, I want equity as well.”
Joshua: Yeah. So, that was a great thing. Depending upon the opportunity, I would kind of chalk it up and if I thought it was a good idea, I'd be “Yeah, let's figure out a way that I could get some crypto tokens for helping out” with these either dowels that I worked with a couple of times or specifically one D5 protocol that I was very bullish on when I was helping out with. And then there were some efforts where I was like “I don't know about this, man. I'm definitely going to help you out here and I'll do the best I can but I don't know if from where I sit in the world, I see a product-market fit or an opportunity.” And so, in those cases, you push a little bit more for cash compensation.
Jayneil: That is amazing. Oh my God! I hope some of those tokens have mooned, as they say.
Joshua: A little larger macro environments, kind of pulling everything down with it, but it's time in the game. So, I think that that's kind of the approach I've taken. It's an interesting opportunity to be able to obtain equity in early stage companies for your sweat time rather than necessarily being asked to cough up a decent amount of cash that is very difficult to come by in most situations.
Jayneil: True. So, you're at BitMax. From there you change jobs and you decide to join Strike. Now, when you join Strike, you initially joined as a product designer, right? You didn't join as a head of design from the get-go.
Joshua: Yeah. No, no, I applied … the role I applied for was actually Systems Design Lead. And so, they were starting to think about design systems and what that meant to the team. And ultimately, that role was deemed a little too early. I was the third designer to join. So, I kind of got in there and it was a company that actually I had identified while my time at BitMax was rolling down as pretty much the only place I wanted to work for or work with and was willing to take kind of whatever role was open to get me into the door at the time.
Jayneil: So, you join Strike without any expectation of becoming the head of design. You don't even mention it to them during the interview. You're just like “I'm going there for the opportunity.” So, what I'm curious about now is when you join them there, they could have decided to hire somebody from the outside to become the head of design, right? And I'm so happy that they chose you and promoted you to that role. And I'm curious to know what were some of the things that made your case such a strong point like “Hey, we need to make Joshua the head of design and promote him.”
Joshua: Yeah. So, I think it was about eight months and … so, it may be six months into the time at Strike that they were like “All right, we need a head of design role.” And we actually opened up the pipeline and had it running for about three months and there was a slew of really high-quality candidates which for one reason or another didn't seem to necessarily be a great fit. And then there was a certain point where I was thinking the velocity and kind of the speed of decisions that we were able to make were really being hampered by no one sitting in on this role. And it was also one of the first times that there were people who were obviously better than me at these individual disciplines. So, there's a couple of incredible product designers on our team. There's one incredible brand designer. And for the first time I was like “Does my skill set necessarily like … am I being best utilized making these dashboards and continuing in this path or is there an opportunity for me to step up and to become some sort of … or support structure so I can take care of all the pain points that have been identified and not necessarily had any paths painted forward as to how to remedy them without that position being filled?” And so, it's kind of … it was an interesting scenario. Obviously, there's always the desire in one's career to step up but I think it's … yeah, it was just one of opportunity and it was kind of right time right place. And ultimately, after quite a few candidates who didn't get through, I reached out and just kind of rang it up the ladder because where I sat in the company, I was working with our chief business officer who was also playing our PM role for quite some time and had worked with him for close to a year at that point. So, I rang it up and I was like “Hey, what would you think?” and basically it kind of just started really organically from there and a couple of conversations later and here we sit.
Jayneil: So, let's break it down there because I know you're being very humble. So, what I read behind the things you just said is you had built relationships with these execs, the C-level execs in Strike over the course of the year and you had also shipped a lot of products by then, right? You built this track record where you'd ship multiple products with most of those executives, right?
Joshua: Absolutely, yeah.
Jayneil: And …
Joshua: So, yeah …
Jayneil: Go ahead.
Joshua: I was just going to say yeah, that was kind of, I think, the main crux of it, to be honest with you, in terms of why this seemed to make sense to the company at large. I've joined as, I think, employee … low 30s. I'm not too sure exactly what number it was but we're around 170 odd people at this point. And so, whenever there's only 30 people on board, there everyone's wearing multiple hats. And so, people who were moving in and out of the orgs as we were rearranging and trying to figure out what the ultimate structure of Strike would look and because of that, you just start to talk to quite a few people. And over the course of just showing up, producing quality work and in general trying to be a decent human being, I think that that goes a long way in establishing credibility. So, that is kind of, again, why I go back to what are the pros and cons of joining it an early stage startup versus a company or an organization that's a bit more mature in all of its processes.
Jayneil: I also caught on to what you just said is because you are employee number 30 or like very early at Strike, you had to wear multiple hats. So, I'm wondering, because you joined early, you might have had to do things that were outside of your role or maybe you just did that like aside from design.
Joshua: Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, I got a crash course in writing PRDs. I really started to understand the ways of GitHub and to integrate myself into kind of these rather complex deploying processes and being able to spin up local and next environments in my own living room and being able to talk to these engineers and the CTO even was a part of my smaller team to begin with. And so, yeah, I don't know, it's one of those things that can be frustrating to some people if you're joining with the expectation that it's going to be this very tidy work environment.
Jayneil: Design thing and I'm writing product requirement documents. That's not even my core role.
Joshua: No, no. And I'll tell you the way that I personally navigate through problems is to visually solve them. And so, I'd much rather hop into Figma and start to like … try to just move chunks of information around. And I can get much … I can get to a solution much quicker than if you throw me into a blank Word doc and say like write a PRD. So, oftentimes I'd have to, in order to write this PRD, to design something and then to retroactively try to deconstruct it and then write how like what I did. So, yeah, it was a bit of a convoluted process but it's also, you know, kind of the fun thing about those opportunities.
Jayneil: But then you also did things that were not required of your role as a designer like you wrote product requirement documents, it seems you were talking to the CTO, you were doing a bunch of stuff in project management, for example. So, I wonder how much of that you going above and beyond your role also played in your favor when they were considering promoting you to the head of design role.
Joshua: Possibly. I think it just shows work ethic, to be honest with you. And it's … one of the most impactful things that any designer can do is ask for more work, especially if they have downtime and given how, I guess, ideologically aligned I am with the mission … Strike. That didn't necessarily feel like work. It just felt like an opportunity to help out my colleagues if I saw them kind of treading water in certain areas. So, yeah …
Jayneil: Wow! Oh my God! That is some amazing, amazing advice, Joshua. How can designers listening to this get in touch with you?
Joshua: Yeah. So, the easiest way to reach me would just be at Joshua@Stripe.me or ping me on LinkedIn. I don't really have a social media presence. I found that it's kind of easier to go through internet in an anonymous fashion. So, I don't know, maybe that'll change in the future but yeah, for the meantime, just LinkedIn or email is best.
Jayneil: Thank you so much, Joshua, for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom.
Joshua: Cool. My pleasure, Jayneil. Thanks for having me.
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